Report on the stringency of climate policies in EU countries

The ENTRACTE research project aims to analyse the European climate policy portfolio with special emphasis on the role of interactions between different policy instruments. The project’s ultimate goal is to provide pragmatic guidance to policy makers for designing effective, cost efficient and politically and legally feasible climate policy portfolios.

This report on “Stringency of Climate Policies” contributes to empirical research by developing an index of environmental policy for the major European economies. It uses approaches from Item Response Theory Models to characterize the implicit complexity of a country’s policy portfolio as well as to produce a country ranking accounting for the propensity to implement environmental policies conditional on the complexity of a given policy portfolio.